Non-fiction. History books. Science for amateur readers. Politics. Social sciences. Essay collections. War reporting. Travel writing. All of them and more reviewed by the Bookworm. Pulp fiction not allowed.

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Friday, 21 September 2012

I Never Knew There Was A Word For It, Adam Jacot de Boinod

Word-lovers are my kind of people. You know the type: people who are genuinely delighted by digging up a little-known, little-used or merely weird expressions. Sir Terry Pratchett springs to mind (with his obvious joy in using words like 'sussuration' or 'figgin'), but the world is full of word-o-maniacs of a lesser standing, too.

De Boinod's impressive collection is full of strange words and phrases with even stranger meanings, gathered from numerous languages from around the world (in case of the first two parts) and old/slang English (The Wonder of Whiffling). Let me give you a few examples (and I'm quoting directly):

kakobijin (Japanese) - the sort of woman who talks incessantly about how she would have been thought of as a stunner if she had lived in a different era, when men's tastes in women were different

Maurerdekoltee (German) - a bricklayer's cleavage (the part of a man's backside you can see when he stoops deeply and his trouser waistband goes down a little bit)

wosdohedan (Dakota, USA) - paths made by squirrels in the grass

As you can see, de Boinod's words are really strange sometimes.

Don't worry about the book's thickness (more than 700 pages) - it looks scary, but in reality it is full of drawings and averages about 15 lines of text per page. :)

I Never Knew There Was A Word For It is not really an exercise in foreign languages - you're unlikely to remember more than three expressions out of the whole brick-like book. It's more of a statue to the human ingenuity when it comes to inventing words. You can see how people's environment and lifestyle shapes their language, and also how intermingled languages really are. A true feast for people of philological persuasion.